I’ve only seen The Man From London (and fell asleep through it so I’m in no position to comment), and I have an unwatched copy of Sátántangó lying around somewhere, so I’m rather unfamiliar with Tarr’s works.

So for the first hour, up to the point when the mysterious man gives his ‘universal debasement’/'evil reigns’ speech (and some of the audience scoffed at it), I felt increasingly apprehensive that the film was going nowhere (even though I’m fully aware of Tarr’s signature slow pacing and austerity, something which I’m sure not everyone in the audience was expecting). But it’s the scene where they try to leave but return that I realised that we’re not dealing with some indulgent pessimist who only likes to play with camera angles. Of course it’s bleak, defeatist stuff with a very annoying score, and I certainly can’t say I enjoyed it (is it possible?), but at the very least I appreciate the ‘methods’ he used, especially the final two scenes, in portraying a doomed humanity .Damnation would have been a better title, but he’s used that already and perhaps he wants to make the Nietzsche connection explicit- see Robert Koehler’s rather good review here.

Two weeks and a bit of HKIFF, and I’ve merely seen 5 films- not good enough. Yet I still feel rather melancholic – what other chance could we watch arthouse films, or simply cinema that matters, at such a regular frequency? Has HKIFF actually encouraged a herd instinct (羊群心態), whereby it’s the only time of the year worth watching and showing films that aren’t pedestrian, that you need to think about, or that it’s the only ‘suitable’ time to try something new/’weird’/'camp’? I’m veering towards a rant here, so I’m gonna stop…

re: The DayDreamer
I see “The Turin Horse” as Tarr’s “purest” film, it expresses his bleak, repetitive, and no-way-out worldview uniformly in terms of story, form and style~ If it is a final statement it’s a rather good one~

as for hkiff, I think what matters is not how the festival is defined, but what you get from it~ there’s always someone who is just looking for “alternative entertainment”, jumping on auteurist bandwagons, or summarizing every film into a single word of praise/disapproval~ as long as they keep quiet during the screening, I have no complaints~

From your discussions both of you were far more observant than me, but I should qualify what I said previously.

Throughout the first hour, I really felt I was seeing the same thing again and again. It’s not the repetition that annoyed me, but I felt the minimal variations to the camera shots like angles and length, as well as variations to the characters’ movement, produced such slight rewards that really wasn’t worth my time and patience.

Though stricty speaking it’s the ‘universal debasement’ speech that’s the first ‘intervening’ scene, but it was
after the leaving-and-returning scene that I ‘awakened’ and started interpreting what I saw. In retrospect, I think that I thought I was seeing in the first hour a mere minimalist exercise and not a gradual progression (however small it may be) of ideas and mise en scene. I simply wasn’t in the mood to see some stringent experiment on formalism and technique- I guess this is why I didn’t ‘get’ 牛皮 I and II. But I guess it’s the later intervening scenes, providing some spare narrative to what we’re watching, that allowed me to form an interpretation and ‘justify’ what I saw in the first hour- the daily routine as ennui, the cruelty of existence and human life, a sense of impending doom that our characters are half-aware.

Perhaps you can deduce from these paragraphs that I’m still attached to a sense of narrative or purpose in film watching, and that I’m probably not too receptive of the avant garde (though I’ve never seen any of James Benning’s films, just by reading articles about his work I don’t think I’ll ever ‘understand’ him). And ‘slow cinema’ isn’t for everyone nor enjoyable at every moment (I feel that Lisandro Alonso is simlar to Bela Tarr, but I’m not particularly fond of his films either). But from what I saw, I certainly won’t count Bela Tarr as some pretentious ‘artist’ (here used by the ignorant masses as an insult regularly).

As for the HKIFF comments, I’m not saying that I mind casual filmgoers going to festival screenings, and as gar said as long as they have the manners then that’s OK with me. Fortunately this year I didn’t encounter any bad experiences- the closest incident I had was overhearing a pair saying before a screening in the Cultural Centre: ‘睇戲冇得食嘢好慘’. They then attempted to open a pack of chips but were thankfully stopped by an usher.

What I’m frustrated about is that while every year the HKIFF boasts about how many tickets they have sold, and the fact that the HKIFF is still overall an arthouse event, there’s still a lack of arthouse new releases in HK cinemas. It’s unbelievable that Taiwan can accomodate limited runs of Mysteries of Lisbon and Uncle Boonmee but we, a city with a far stronger cinema heritage and international influences, could only come up mainstream fare from overseas as ‘world cinema’. We don’t even have a proper arthouse cinema in HK anymore (bc Cinematheque is an awkward brand, and 影藝戲院 is just a joke). There must be an audience in HK receptive to cinema outside the Hollywood norm, but it does seem to me that their coming out parade is only once a year. No one is pretending that it’s OK to lose money, and non-mainstream releases won’t be very (if at all) profitable, but I’m starting to think that it’s the reluctance of both the distributors and latent arthouse movie goers, coupled with the convenient ‘excuse’ that is the HKIFF (in fact, any ‘festival’ is really a marketing label), that have contributed to the dearth of arthouse films in HK.

I’m ranting again, and I admit HK has it far better compared to other places. I guess passion and anger are intertwined :S

As for the dearth of arthouse films in Hong Kong, I generally share your frustration/anger~ I pessimistically think that the “audience in HK receptive to cinema outside the Hollywood norm” AND habitually willing to seek out the latest arthouse releases is rather small~ BC is a very careful distributor and they release only the most prestigious arthouse films around, but still public reception is often lukewarm~ I wonder if the majority of HKIFF goers are only causal viewers who are willing to try out some “weird stuffs” once or twice a year, with little concern or interest for arthouse cinema in general~

On the positive side, there are so many mini festivals in Hong Kong these days that should keep any film buff very busy all year round~ French May is coming and then there is HKSIFF, as well as retrospectives held by the Film Programmes Office~ By the way, the Grand Cinema is showing “Honey” this Thursday (along with a Reha Erdem retrospective), please see if you can make it~

What The DayDreamer said was really true about how HKIFF boosted about how fast the ticket sales go and the number of tickets. I really did forget what was it like many years ago. However the ‘commercial taste’ about this event grows stronger and stronger. But eventually this is a ‘must not fail too much’ because it receives fund from govt, all eyes are on them. For this there’s no more complaints from me.
I guess HKIFF is passive when it comes to venues selection, they took wherever is available & as much as possible. The closest art-house type of venue should be AC & Film Archive, as least personally I agree they are. I do not see the death of arthouse film markets in hk if it is only the limitation of venues, through out the year there are a lot of mini-festivals of retrospectives and different types of alternative / world cinema movies. I feel it is busy enough for movie lovers.

gar – difficult for me to describe “how far are we from madhouse” as in the meet the Director section, Director Li HungQi also didn’t explain much about the movie as well. His interview with ARTDA reveals more:
李红旗凭《寒假》获洛迦诺电影节金豹奖杯http://www.artda.cn/www/20/2010-08/4152.html

re: g
I think the Daydreamer’s complaint is that Hong Kong lacks a cinema that is willing to screen arthouse films on a regular basis~ Yes, there are enough festivals that would keep film lovers busy, but films in these festivals are often screened twice: does it imply that the total arthouse audience in HK can be fit into merely two screenings?